Duckstation | Make PlayStation PS1 Games Look EXACTLY How YOU Want | Full In Depth Graphics Guide

in this video I'm going to be showing you how to upscale your PlayStation 1 games and get them to look exactly how you want using the duck station emulator now this isn't a best settings guide because there really isn't such a thing it definitely comes down to preference how you like this generation of consoles to look some people like to turn all the enhancements on and have everything in wide screen like me and some people like to keep things more authentic by having the original resolution and using something like a CRT Shader so what I'm going to do instead is show you every single visual enhancement in sequence and give you side by-side examples of exactly what it does so by the end of the video you're going to know what these visual options do but more importantly what they look like so effectively you can use this as a reference guide to get things set up for your exact personal preference you're also going to need to know how to save all of this on a per game basis cuz some of these enhancements might look amazing for some games but they could break others and of course I'm going to show you how to do that towards the end of the video there's obviously quite a lot to cover so let's just get straight into it once you've got duck station started up go into settings and we're going to begin with interface you're pretty much good on defaults here but you need to make sure that apply per game settings is active and for obvious reasons start and full screen now we can move on to the graphics tab starting at the top with renderer and duck station does default to automatic however I recommend that you actually set your graphics back end of choice to make sure that it is being used and it does make it a bit easier for troubleshooting now in terms of the way these look as you can see you'll be hardpressed to tell them apart apart from software mode which is essentially locked to the original resolution and honestly there really is no best renderer it's about what you have available for your Hardware compatibility and performance keep in mind that software mode obviously isn't using Hardware acceleration and as a result you can't use the majority of the enhancements with it however because it is software mode it is 100 % compatible with every single game so I recommend using it as a backup if none of the hardware renderers work which is very rare but for the sake of this video I'm just going to go ahead and go with direct 3d1 moving down to adapter which is your graphics hardware and again I recommend leaving nothing to chance and selecting your main GPU the rest of these options are now on these nice convenient tabs and we're going to start on the left with rendering right at the top with internal resolution now I recommend that you just set this to the resolution of your screen but obviously you can set it to whatever you want and I am going to show you every single resolution all the way up to 4K and if you notice as we go through these resolutions the amount of jaggies is also being reduced the higher the resolution we're not actually applying anti-aliasing it's just a byproduct of increasing our pixel count and we're going to take note of that for a little bit later down sampling to put into layman's terms is for users that want the benefit of using a higher internal resolution but still still want things to look like they're being output at a lower resolution especially with the 2D assets so duct station is downsampling your image after it's gone through the hardware renderer at your set internal resolution there's a few reasons you might want to do this but the main reason this exists at all is that arguably 2D images look better down sampled from a higher internal resolution and I have a tendency to agree anyway not to get too far ahead of myself down sampling has two different options box and adaptive and the reasons for using each are quite different and we're going to start with box so box down sampling will down sample the entire image and you can even choose which resolution you down sample to on the right hand side here and where this is generally used to smooth out just pure 2D games it does have an alternative application for every game and that is anti-aliasing so if you're an anti-aliasing user you might have say 1X native set and then you just add your anti-aliasing but because we have box down sampling we can do that on the inverse if you remember from earlier on increasing our internal resolution also gets rid of the jaggies without the need for anti-aliasing then you can just box down sample to your desired resolution not everyone is going to be into doing it that way and it will be giving a side bys side comparison with traditional anti-aliasing when we hit that section adaptive down sampling doesn't apply to the entire image it only applies to the 2D stuff so menus Huds goys UI Sprites and anything else that is 2D and it leaves all of the 3D stuff well alone and this is for users that want to increase their internal resolution but don't necessarily like the pixelation that can happen on the 2D stuff as a result of increasing your resolution so with this you kind of get the best of both welds you get to keep all your 3D stuff looking nice and sharp with a high resolution but all the 2D stuff looking smooth with a lower resolution one of the unfortunate downsides to Adaptive down sampling is that you can't use five six or 7x resolutions it works just fine at 8X and 4K and if you have it set to 5 6 or 7 it will just default to 4X native moving on to texture filtering and I only ever Ed nearest neighbor and that's just because I have let's just say opinions on all of the others but not to be biased I am going to show you what all of these look like people do like to use these in conjunction with CRT shaders but just to keep everything at a baseline I'm going to show you what these look like with no shaders so you can form your own opinion do keep in mind some of these texture filters are very demanding and are probably going to tank performance if you're on a mid-range PC with aspect ratios you're pretty much all good on Auto game native but you can set one of these if you need to do keep in mind that these widecreen resolutions will only appear stretched like this until we set the WID screen cheat or activate the widecreen hack so it looks like this which obviously looks much better and is true animorph widescreen but because the wien screen cheats and hacks don't work for every game I tend to set it up on a per game basis if everything is working correctly and I'll show you how to do that in the WID screen section towards the end of the video so I keep this on game native by default and only change it on a per game basis moving on to De interlacing and to my surprise there's actually quite a lot of 48i games that were made for the PlayStation 1 way more than what i' thought and emulating these with no deting options on whatsoever does look quite rough and that's because obviously inating was meant for CRTs and you can really see it trying to present both fields at the same time this effect is more pronounced at lower resolutions so everything in this section is going to be shown at 1X now of course activating a deining option stops those alternating fields to present a consistent image and we have two separate options to achieve the same thing we have this deating option here and we have this disable intering option at the bottom here of the two disabled interlacing does look the best which is why this de interlacing option has been set up to be used as a backup because when disabled interlacing is active deining will automatically turn itself off as soon as you disable disable interlacing de interlacing will step in and turn itself on to complicate things even further this deining option allows you to choose from three different algorithms to remove those alternating lines disabled is just a way to turn it off so we got weave blend and adaptive and all three of these do look quite different and the best way to demonstrate this is with this boring old text but doing it this way allows you to see exactly how each of these algorithms is combining those fields to simplify the whole deining thing just leave disable interlacing on as it looks the best and then select your favorite de interlacing backup if you need it adaptive is the default the crop function controls held duct station is cropping into the image so back in the day on CRT TVs there'll be an overscan area that in most cases would be covered up by the bezel on your actual TV and most developers would make their games with this overscan area in mind some would even go so far as to use it to hide screen effects and other stuff that you're not necessarily meant to see and with games like Crash Bandicoot there' just be black bars in that overscan area and as you can see setting the crop to only overscan area is is the best way to maximize your screen space however not all games were made with that overscan area in mind games like in the hunt here were made with functional pixels all the way to the edge of the screen including in the overscan area so for these types of games when the crop is set to overscan area we're actually losing some of the image so for these games we want to make sure the crop is set to none so all of the image is being displayed games like in the hunt are pretty rare so I tend to set this to only over scan area by default and set none on a per game basis as and when a need to the scaling function determines how the output is upscaled or downscale to your monitor's resolution so what does that mean in layman's terms basically bilinear smooth and bilinear sharp are like applying a smooth or a sharp filter across the entire screen nearest neighbor integer obviously works in integers and can make some 2D games look a bit sharper but it does reduce the viewport size so I tend to stay away from it and nearest neighbor is what the PlayStation 1 used to use to help make a decision I'm going to leave nearest neighbor on the left and cycle through the other three on the right so you've got something to compare it to vsync you probably noticed has been appearing and disappearing from this section throughout the video that's because the emulator got an update and vsync has been moved while Stars recording so now vsync is in the emulation tab now I'm not going to patronize anyone and show you what vsync does we all know what it does but I am going to show you the options so we have vertical sync which is meant just for normal displays then we have optimal frame pacing which is meant for g-sync and freesync monitors and we also have the ability to reduce input latency if you're using that now sync to host refresh rate does produce the smoothest animations but it can increase emulation speed by up to 1% so use these at your own discretion TR color rendering has a bit of a deceiving name as it disables the PlayStation 1's Infamous dithering and for me this is a no-brainer it makes things look so much better and it does break some effects in a small handful of games but I haven't come across one yet so I'm happy to leave this on by default and if it does break a game I'll just turn it off for that game widescreen rendering is essentially the widescreen hack not to be confused with wi screen cheats which are made for the game specifically now I am going to be going a bit more in depth with this function towards the end of the video in the widescreen section so we are just going to kind of skin past it for the moment and we're just going to quickly skin past pgxp because I need to cover this more in depth at the end of this section so with Force 4x3 for fmvs if you're using a widescreen resolution it will force 4x3 for those fm3 cutscenes so if you don't want those to appear stretched make sure that you leave this checked FMV chromis smoing helps to reduce that color bless that you see in those FMV sequences not by much but it's better than nothing disabl interlacing we've already gone over with the deating function now Force ntsc timings essentially forces 60 HZ to 50 HZ power region games and I personally don't really find a use for it if I've got a choice between pal and ntsc I'll always go with ntsc because it natively runs at 60 HZ and pal region exclusives were meant to be run at pal region 50 HZ timings now we can move on to pgxp Geometry correction and as you can see when you activate this you then get access to the pgxp tab at the top here so click on this and you can see that you have all of the other pgxp options now to properly explain pgxp it needs to be broken down into its three main different settings slf functions first up we have geometry correction which fixes the actual geometry wireframe of a 3D game stopping all of that wobbling and warping that you see in terrain and 3D models secondly we've got perspective correct textures which fixes the textures that sit on top of that wireframe now Pierce one textures do have a tendency to warp and pop into different positions especially if you're moving around and changing your perspective which is why as you guessed it it's called perspective correct textures and thirdly we've got perspective correct colors which is a little bit misleading because it only applies to the vertex colors not all colors doing a side by side for this one is a bit tricky because I couldn't find any games where it made a discernable difference so I'm going to use Alien Resurrection as an example because it uses loads of vertex colors so you can see if you can find any differences yourself so just a quickly backtrack pgxp geometry correction must be active to be able to get to the pgxp tab here and as you can see you've got perspective correct textures right there and perspective correct colors which really should be called perspective correct vertex colors and you can turn these on or off depending if they break anything or not all of these other options are what I like to call assist options and starting with coloring correction this increases the Precision of the geometry correction so if you see any holes in Geometry using this should fix that preserve projection Precision is really hard to say and basically it gives a little bit more oomph to the entire pgxp chain so if you turn pgxp on and things are still wobbling around you can turn preserve projection Precision on and it may help to further even things out but don't expect any Miracles CPU mode you don't really need to worry about or have it active it automatically applies itself for the games that absolutely need it it uses pgxp for all instructions which some games need for pgxp to work vertex Cache can increase pgxp compatibility with some games but by its own admission generally provides no benefit so honestly I just pretend this one doesn't exist now geometry tolerance depth clear threshold and if we go back to rendering the pgxp depth buffer I recommend that you actually stay clear of these are hacks and workarounds really meant for advanced usage and not even I have my head around these yet now pgxp is finally done and out the way we can go over to the advanced Tab and we're going to start with exclusive full screen there's really only one thing you need to know and that is borderless full screen all the way but if you are using one of the direct 3D drivers you do have access to all of these different display modes if you need them screen position obviously we want that to be in the center now if you want to limit your frames per second for any reason you can do so with display FPS limit but the reasons for doing so are super specific so for the most part you want to keep this at zero now threaded rendering is exclusive for the software renderer but if you remember from earlier on we're only using software mode as a backup so we're going to change this back to direct 3D 11 however if you are on the lowest End Hardware possible software mode with threaded rendering does perform the best threaded presentation is for the Vulcan renderer exclusively and if you are using Vulcan you should definitely be using it you're getting extra performance with basically no drawbacks so I'm just going to change that back to d3d 111 multi sampling is your anti-aliasing and we've got multi sample and super sampling options all the way up to 32x as I mentioned earlier on anti-aliasing is really meant for those that want to use a lower resolution but still get rid of some jaggies keep in mind if you've got a for a GPU like me you're probably not going to be able to use 16 or 32x so on the left is the Default Resolution at 1X with no anti-aliasing applied and the two on the right are again at 1X but I'm going to cycle through up to time a anti-aliasing for both because that's all I can go up to and again as I mentioned earlier using down sampling is a good alternative to using anti-aliasing so to give you a comparison on the left will be a down sampled image this is is a 1080p image down sample to 1x and the two on the right are at 1X resolution but with times a msaa and times a ssaa so you can compare these and decide which one you prefer but do keep in mind that if you are running a high resolution you don't really need to use anti-aliasing at all now we can move on to line detection so when increasing your internal resolution sometimes one pixel wide gaps can appear as lines and using one of these three options can help with that so we've got quads triangles basic and triangles aggressive there isn't really a best option it's just which one is actually working with your game full disclosure on this one I haven't actually found any games where it's made a difference and with honesty being the best policy I don't think I really fully understand this one or know which games is meant to be used with so if you've got a better understanding with line detection than me and you've got a game where I can give a side by-side comparison with let me know in the comments below true color debanding is used at the same time as true color rendering so if I turn this off go back to advance you can see that we lose access to it if I turn it back on you can see that it appears again and using this applies modern dithering techniques to help further smooth out those gradients so to put this into layman's terms it's like anti dithering plus scale dithering is an alternative method to removing the dithering pattern and it's really been set up to be used as a backup to true color rendering it does do a good job at removing the dithering but not as good a job as true color rendering but it doesn't break stuff in the same way which is why it's been set up to be used as a backup so if I go over to rendering and turn off true color rendering for example it could break some effects go back to Advanced we can see that we then get access to this option however if I leave this active I know that it's going to step in if I simply turn true color rendering off so I know I've got it there as a solid backup so this has ended up being the dithering section so I'm going to put all three different ways you can remove it side by side so you've got true color rendering true color rendering with debanding and scale dithering on its own software renderer rebacks can give you extra performance if you're using graphical enhancements so if your FPS is waning after you've done all of your video options you can check this to try and get some extra performance before we move on to shaders I do just want to quickly cover the onscreen display stuff this does obviously come in handy if you're faffing around with your settings and you need to check your performance as you're doing it but the most handy one of these is the show settings overlay this tells you exactly what enhancements you're using at a glance so if you like me and you forget what you set all the time you can just look in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and it's right there now we can move on to shaders which is the postprocessing tab on the left hand side now the subject of shaders is pretty big and there's a million different shaders out there for a bunch of different reasons but their main application is for CRT effects like scan lines some people feel that shaders are a prerequisite for PlayStation 1 graphics and other people such as myself can kind of take them or leave them so to narrow all of this down I'm going to show you how to use the standard ones that come with duck station and how to edit them if you're using shaders the first thing you want to do is enable postprocessing then to add a Shader to the postprocessing chain just click on this add button here which one of these you select does come down to personal preference so I'm going to just kind of select a random CRT Shader that has a few options available so just click on it and you can see it's been added to the chain then if you click on it once it's in the chain you can see you get each individual adjustment option appear for it underneath and for this particular Shader we can adjust the scan lines screen warp The Mask Bloom and a whole bunch of other stuff these adjustment options will change per Shader depending on what the Shader has been designed to do now the reason this is called a postprocessing chain is because you can add multiple shaders at the same time overlaying them so if you like one effect with one Shader but a different effect with a different Shader you can have the best of both welds and overlay them but where I find the chain most functional is for further fine tune adjustments you can see with this Shader we don't have any gamma options so if I wanted to further adjust the gamma and only the gamma I can do so so I just press add in the top right hand corner and then add the simple gamma Shader click on that and as you can see it only has gamma options available because it's only a simple gamma Shader so now I can adjust these options in tandem to get things looking exactly how I want do keep in mind that these Shavers are executed in sequence from top to bottom and if you want to change that order for any reason you've got the move down and move up buttons on the right hand side now that we've covered pretty much every single visual option I do just want to quickly give some advice on how you have your default set up now some people like to have every single visual enhancement on and if they break anything they'll just turn those ones off other people like to start with default with everything turned off and then incrementally turn everything on and then there are people that are super specific with how they want their games to look in which case they know exactly what they want to say for me I kind of use a bit of a mix for enhancements and the enhancements I tend to leave off are 50 if they're going to work or not so I'll will test these per game and then turn them on or off I'm just going to go back through my tabs so you can pause and copy me if you want to do the same thing now you have all of your default set up I'm going to show you how to change all of this on a per game basis but before you do that you want to go over to the onscreen display tab here and make sure that you turn on the show settings overlay this lets you keep track of exactly what you're set in to change settings per game you need the game loaded up and running then just press escape on your keyboard to get to this menu now you don't want to use the settings option at the bottom here because this is only for global settings it's the game properties option that changes and saves everything per game so click on this and then in the top right hand corner you want to click on the image Tab and this contains every single visual option that we've just gone over the first thing I need to do here is explain how these slider buttons work on the right hand side because it's not that obvious so if it's gray and in the middle it means that it's using the global defaults if it's blue and to the right it means that it's on for this game only and if it's red or orange and to the left it means that it's off for this game only I know that I want this on global defaults so I'm going to leave it as gray and in the middle now one of the best things about duck station is that you can change any of these settings on the Fly and they'll be updated in real time with no need to restart the emulator or with adverse effects the worst thing that can happen is you'll need to compile a Shader and that only takes a couple of seconds and once they're compiled you won't need to do it again so with these settings you can just have at it and change whatever you want just to see how it looks so just to kind of demonstrate this in action I've got 20 HKS loaded up with my default settings so I'm just going to press Escape go to game properties up to the image Tab and I'm going to change let's say the internal resolution down to 1x go back to the game and you can see that we've immediately switched to the original resolution and if you press escape again go back to game properties image Tab and change the internal resolution back to global settings which for me is 1080p we can see that it immediately switches back nice and easy another thing I like to do is give everything think a quick visual once over to make sure that none of the enhancements are breaking anything and you can see here the pgxp is having an adverse effect despite all of the assist options being on and in this scenario turning pgxp off entirely is preferable CU it basically isn't doing anything especially with that quter pipe in the background the geometry is simply not lining up so I'm going to press Escape go to game properties up to the image Tab and I'm going to turn off pgxp entirely there is is let's turn that off and go back to the game and you can see that now looks much much better so despite pgxp being an enhancement it's definitely preferable to keep it off for this game specifically unfortunately not all of the options are available from the in game menu when you press escape on your keyboards options like anti-aliasing are simply not available here which means that we can't access them which means that we can't save them on a per game basis from this menu however we can do it by adjus ing the game's properties which is just an alternative method to saving everything per game all you need to do is find your game in dark station right click on it and go to properties and this truly contains absolutely every single option including what you set in the game properties menu so if we go to Graphics Advanced I can now save my anti- aling on a per game basis which I couldn't do from the ingame menu the check boxes here work the same as the slider buttons from the game properties menu so so if there's a gray box it means that it's using the global defaults if there's a tick it means that it's on for this game only and if it's a black box it means that it's off of this game only I want it as Global defaults so it's going to be a gray box before I close out the video I do want to show you how to set up anamorphic wide screen on a per game basis I'm using qu2 as an example again because it demonstrates exactly what I want it to so press escape on your keyboard go into game properties and then go up to the image tab again and the first thing you want to do here is change your aspect ratio I've got a 16x9 monitor so obviously I'm going to select 16x9 go back to the game and you can see this is appearing stretched and it will only appear stretched until we activate the WID screen hack or activate a WID screen cheat for the best results you should be checking to see if the game has a WID screen cheat first WID screen cheats have been made for that game specifically and generally yield better results with less Popin so press escape on your keyboard and you can see you've got a cheat list here click on this scroll all the way down to the bottom and you can see we've got a widescreen 16x9 sheet you want to activate this and double check that it actually works despite getting better results WID screen cheats don't always work so turn it on go back to the game and you can see that with this WID screen cheat unfortunately it doesn't actually work so we're going to fall back onto the WID screen hack and see if that works instead but before we do that we actually want to turn off any widescreen cheats just to make sure they don't interfere with anything thing so deactivate those if you turn any on then go into game properties up to image options and find the widc screen hack and where is it there it is turn this on for this game go back to the game play and there we go true anamorphic widescreen just going to quickly double check the Popin and it looks good to me so despite the fact the widescreen cheat didn't work the widescreen hack works just fine as an alternative do keep in mind that 2D games like Resident Evil here with his pre-render backgrounds simply have nothing else to display beyond the 4x3 image this is because obviously the developers wouldn't have drawn a 16x9 image knowing it was only going to be displayed on a 4x3 display especially in 1996 there are a handful of native widescreen games and for these you'll still need to set 16x9 but you also need to make sure that you turn on widescreen in the actual ingame settings now in the description I'm going to put a couple of resources a list of four AI games a list of native widescreen games and a link to a video that covers a Shader that's pretty much converted me to being a shaders guy at least with darkstation and his video has a download link and a full tutorial on how to use it so I'm going to link all of that in the description below there we go that was a breakdown of pretty much every single visual option for duck station and as I mentioned right at the beginning of the video how you want these games to look really does come down to personal preference the majority of us are just going to want to turn all the enhancements on so it looks good on a digital display and others are going to want to keep things more authentic but however you like things to look share your settings in the comments down below slam me a like if you like this video and if you want to see more of this kind of content slam me and subscribe and apart from that go play some games adios

Channel: Warped Polygon

Views: 31,844

Keywords: emulation, gaming, warpedpolygon, arcade

Id: KuKdeez8I5I

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024